Staff Machine Learning Engineer, Ads Content Understanding · Reddit

Sat, 25 Apr 2026 12:05:51 GMT
Engineering

Reddit · Remote - United States · $230,000-$322,000 USD · remote

Reddit is a community of communities. It's built on shared interests, passion, and trust, and is home to the most open and authentic conversations on the internet. Every day, Reddit users submit, vote, and comment on the topics they care most about. For more information, visit [www.redditinc.com](http://www.redditinc.com).

Ads Content Understanding (ACU) is Reddit's core commercial content understanding team for Ads. The team owns and produces signals that describe what Reddit content is about, how brand safe and suitable it is, and what users are trying to accomplish in commercial conversations.

We are looking for a Staff Machine Learning Engineer who will lead the Commercial Content Understanding roadmap for the Monetization org and act as the technical owner for ACU's signals and ML systems. Roughly 50% of their time should be spent in technical leadership and mentorship (driving designs, standards, cross-team alignment), and 50% in direct hands-on work (modeling, pipelines, and debugging complex production systems).

Responsibilities:

Provide technical leadership and mentorship to MLEs and SWEs doing ML work in ACU, acting as de facto tech lead for content understanding and signals: driving design reviews, setting technical standards, and uplifting the team's modeling and systems craft.

Develop evaluation systems and quality monitoring systems for content understanding signals, using SOTA LM-judge practices.

Drive operational excellence for ACU's ML systems by defining SLOs, alerting, and dashboards for key signals (coverage, latency, precision/recall, cost)

Build and evolve content understanding capabilities for commercial conversations (e.g., reviews vs. recommendations vs. comparisons vs. Q&A; sentiment and stance; product entities and categories) and operationalize them as robust signals that power contextual and shopping ads, auto-targeting, new formats, and insights products.

Lead design and implementation of signals pipelines and produce an ACU signals registry. Partner with platform teams and other content understanding teams to ensure efficient, reliable serving at Reddit scale.

Drive LLM and modern ML best practices within ACU: define when to prompt, finetune, or distill; design evaluation and safety harnesses; and lead at least one major distillation effort to replace external APIs with in-house models.

Operate across the full ML lifecycle (problem framing, data, modeling, evaluation, deployment, monitoring, and oncall), designing scalable, resilient MLOps pipelines and championing responsible AI (bias, safety, explainability) for ACU's models and signals in production.

Required Qualifications:

7+ years of relevant MLE experience delivering production ML systems (models + pipelines + serving) at scale, ideally in large-scale content understanding domains, or Ads.

Demonstrated Staff-level technical leadership: has driven architecture decisions, standards, and design reviews across multiple teams, and has aligned PMs, DSs, and engineers on shared ML systems or platforms without direct people-management authority.

Excellent communication skills, with the ability to explain complex technical trade-offs to PMs, DSs, and other engineering teams, especially in ambiguous, cross-team problem spaces like Seekers/Searchers monetization.

Strong track record building and shipping NLP / Language models / content understanding models to production (e.g., classifiers, encoders, sequence or session models), with clear business outcomes (e.g., CTR/ROAS uplift, safety improvements).

Practical experience using LLMs in production for labeling, evaluation, or distillation (e.g., LM-as-judge, prompt-based classifiers, LLM-generated labels distilled into smaller models), including managing quality, cost, and latency trade-offs.

Deep experience with PyTorch, TensorFlow, or similar, and production-quality code in Python (and ideally one statically typed language like Go/Java/C++). Comfortable owning training, evaluation, and deployment code end-to-end.

Experience designing ML systems and pipelines: offline training, feature pipelines (batch/streaming), online serving, monitoring, and experimentation for high-traffic surfaces.

Benefits:

Comprehensive Healthcare Benefits and Income Replacement Programs

401k with Employer Match

Global Benefit programs that fit your lifestyle, from workspace to professional development to caregiving support

Family Planning Support

Gender-Affirming Care

Mental Health & Coaching Benefits

Flexible Vacation & Paid Volunteer Time Off

Generous Paid Parental Leave

#LI-Remote

Pay Transparency: This job posting may span more than one career level. In addition to base salary, this job is eligible to receive equity in the form of restricted stock units, and depending on the position offered, it may also be eligible to receive a commission. Additionally, Reddit offers a wide range of benefits to U.S.-based employees, including medical, dental, and vision insurance, 401(k) program with employer match, generous time off for vacation, and parental leave. To learn more, please visit https://www.redditinc.com/careers/. To provide greater transparency to candidates, we share base salary ranges for all US-based job postings regardless of state. We set standard base pay ranges for all roles based on function, level, and country location, benchmarked against similar stage growth companies. Final offer amounts are determined by multiple factors including, skills, depth of work experience and relevant licenses/credentials, and may vary from the amounts listed below. The base salary range for this position is: $230,000-$322,000 USD